🚀 go-pugleaf

> 1) Why would SCO ship brain_damaged binaries such as this?

Because they're SCO.  Next question?  ;-)

> 2) I thought it was 'rn' that had the .UUCP hardcode bug. Does
> bnews also?

I believe that SCO rn has been modified to get the domain the same way
B News was (see below).

> 3) Is it any wonder so many sites have this flaw (I see them
> daily) if this is the case? [danger: rhetorical question]

Not really.

> 4) How would this user, *with the least effort* get his own
> version of bnews compiled? (i.e. did SCO do weird things to news
> to make it work on their box?)

You don't have to do that.  I'm not sure if this is documented or not,
but if you put your domain name, with a leading dot, in
/usr/lib/news/localdomain, SCO's news will use that instead of .UUCP.
For example, for my site (mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us), I would put
".ann-arbor.mi.us" in /usr/lib/news/localdomain.

FYI, I believe there's a similar file in /usr/lib/news called
"control" or "forward" or something like that, which tells B News
whether to automatically execute control messages, or whether an
administrator should be notified.  The default is to automatically do
everything, which is probably okay for somebody who just wants to type
"custom", config the software, and forget about it -- but probably not
okay for people who actually know something about Usenet.  I can look
around and see what the exact filename is if people are interested.

This works on the version of B News and Xenix that I happen to have
around.  The usual disclaimers apply, of course, and if you *can*
compile News yourself you might want to do so anyway.

--
Marc Unangst               | "da-DE-DA: I am sorry, the country you have
mju@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us  | dialed is not in service.  Please check the
...!umich!leebai!mudos!mju | number and try again."  -- Telecom Kuwait